Day 1

Today is the day. The first day of the New Year (and the rest of my life blah, blah . . . ). Well I still can't give up new year’s resolutions. The human instinct to aspire I suppose. If there is a theme to this year's it probably goes something like this. When everything around you seems to be falling apart, it just might be the point where time and space becomes available to bring everything together.

The theme of last year was more along the lines of letting go – both in the positive and negative. Probably the biggest disappointment was struggling on the job through the crisis. And while the year was by all measures not a total disaster, the great momentum of the first three years in the new job has stalled alarmingly. In fact it was exactly this time last year that the killer deal we needed to ride out he crisis did not come through as expected. And honestly it hasn’t gotten any better.  In the final assessment, there are many things that were done and many that could have been done better, but just as many outside my control. Hence the letting go . . .

Other things let go good and bad. My weight – defiantly let go a few pounds (positive). My guitar lessons. After a strong start, just felt I had to let that go in the face of new travel demands (mixed). PhD . . . Well that was a battle I tried to fight but could not win just yet, and although some progress was made, too many things unfinished and dangling (negative). Learning languages – after passing French with a D- in collage, taking Spanish lessons the summer before my MBA , and taking lessons in Slovak, Russian, German, and Hungarian while working and living abroad I had long ago let go of any notion that I would be multilingual let alone bilingual (too depressing to even rate) – but now I am starting to question that wisdom in the face of living again in yet another country. This new adventure, headquartered in Kiev, Ukraine is met with some excitement, and more than a bit of foreboding, but mostly with the sense of tiredness of a weary road warrior possibly a year or two past his prime?

So can I turn it all around? Don’t know but I will give it my best shot. Here are my resolutions . . .

1.       Get healthy

2.       Lose 10 kilos (22 pounds)

3.       Start a new business

4.       Learn to play guitar

5.       Spend more quality time with the boys

6.       Take up photography

7.       Learn a foreign language

8.       Play board games instead of video games

9.       Write a novel

10.   Become a Lean Six Sigma Master Black-belt

11.   Get my PhD

12.   Stay employed (could be tougher than usual if I do all these other things J)